Indie rock legends Spoon will be releasing They Want My Soul, the long-awaited followup to 2010’s Transference, next month. Now, the band is unveiling their new Vinyl Gratification program, where fans who pre-order a vinyl copy of the album from participating record stores will immediately receive a limited-edition 10″ with three pre-release songs (“Rent I Pay,” “Do You,” and “Inside Out,” reportedly). It’s a pretty cool idea! The program is launching on July 15, and you can read more about it on the band’s website, where frontman Britt Daniel shares a few words about the concept:

A few weeks ago as we were figuring out how to roll out the new Spoon album I kept coming back to this: why do we incentivize people to buy our music from big outlets but we don’t extend the same courtesy to actual record stores? Case in point: why do we encourage listeners to buy early by offering “instant gratification” tracks for pre-orders of the digital album, yet there’s no special motivation for buying music from Waterloo or Reckless Records?? And there’s no incentive to buy the format that so many of those listeners prefer — an actual physical item they can hold and read and play on a turntable.

So I came up with an idea, and today I’m pretty ecstatic to be able introduce the Vinyl Gratification program. It’s the first program of its kind; it encourages pre-ordering a vinyl copy of our new album They Want My Soul at independent record stores all over the US (and soon, internationally) by providing its own sort of instant gratification: a limited edition 10″ vinyl featuring three pre-release songs from the album that you can take home with you and put on your record player immediately. The great people at Record Store Day have generously offered to spread the word about the program and we’re launching with 150 stores on board, well beyond our wildest dreams. … If like me, you’ve ever rushed home with a brand new record that you couldn’t wait to play — and couldn’t actually play until you slapped it onto your turntable — I hope the Vinyl Gratification program will bring back some magic for you. And I hope you’ll join us in supporting the independent record shops that have supported us for so long.

They Want My Soul is out 8/5 on Loma Vista. You can pre-order a digital copy of the album here, and find Vinyl Gratification-participating record stores here.

This is such a great idea, especially after having such bad luck last year with online vinyl pre-orders. So many times I’d walk into my record store and they’d have copies of the vinyl that I pre-ordered but was still waiting on it. Or last week when I went in to get How To Dress Well but they only had one copy. (Turns out my friend called ahead and had them hold it. So it was there, but not for me.)

It reminds me of when I’d pre-order a video game. That feeling of walking into a store and getting something that you already paid for, but in that moment it sort of feels like it’s free? This whole 10″ with actual songs from the record is super great news too. I wonder if they’ll release the album in 45rpm? Probably not, which would make the pre-release tracks that much more valuable.

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